Right-to-know
crusader Moss was FBI's thorn

By Michael Doyle
Bee Washington Bureau (Published Sept. 2, 2001)

WASHINGTON -- John Moss caught the eye of FBI gumshoes long
before he wrote the pesky Freedom of Information Act.

The late Sacramento-area congressman had a knack, it seems,
for getting under J. Edgar Hoover's skin. But it's only now, thanks to Moss'
very own information-freeing law, that the flavor of FBI distaste for Moss has
become clear.

"Our relations have not been favorable with Congressman
Moss," observed a March 31, 1960, FBI note, obtained by The Bee under the
Freedom of Information Act. "It is noted that in 1956 Moss publicly stated he
was inquiring of the Attorney General as to why the press had been barred from
FBI schools for Southern police officers on civil rights."

Six years after that FBI memo got filed, Moss would shepherd
into law the Freedom of Information Act that has irrevocably changed how
government does business. His 1966 law, amended and shaped by numerous court
rulings, is the tool empowering more than 1 million requests filed annually in
search of everything from trade secrets to UFOs.

It's the tool that's disgorged FBI files on Fresno-based
Central Valley peace activists and on the late San Joaquin Valley Congressman
Bernie Sisk. It's revealed accidents of nuclear-weapons convoys in the Central
Valley, injuries of Yosemite National Park workers and the subsidized antics of
Mr. C.W. -- the California Walnut Commission's animated figure used in overseas
ads.

But Moss' Freedom of Information Act has also spurred those
seeking corporate advantage or conspiracy theories. Of the 18,841 requests
received by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1999, 88 percent were
classified as commercial. And of the 832 FOIA requests received by the secretive
National Security Agency in 1998 and reviewed by The Bee, 117 sought information
on UFOs. This was the greatest single topic for requests to the agency.

"He thought it was just fundamental to the democratic
process that people have information," said Tom Greene, a former Moss staffer
who's now California's senior assistant attorney general. "He thought that the
more it was used, the better."

Many of the uses weren't predicted in the mid-1950s, when
the Freedom of Information Act was still a gleam in Moss' eye and when the FBI
began compiling its dossier. By the time of his death in 1997 at age 82, Moss'
FBI file would grow to be nearly 2 inches thick, padded out with duplications,
cover pages and routine correspondence.

"Given the battles that he waged on behalf of freedom of
information, he must have known that the government was compiling a thick
dossier on him," said Michael Lemov, a Washington attorney who served as Moss'
committee counsel. "He irked everyone who was in power."

The FBI file does not show Moss was under active
surveillance by the agency he criticized, nor did he face any formal
investigation. A big portion of it covers the FBI's efforts to track those who'd
written threatening letters to Moss and other lawmakers.

But in 1957, when Moss was 42 and in his third congressional
term, the FBI began compiling documents under his name. The tenor of the
coverage shows, in hindsight, just how sensitive the agency was to criticism.
When Moss chastised the Air Force for a "silly cover-up," the FBI clipped the
resulting May 1958 news article and made it part of his file. And when Moss
spoke about government secrecy and press freedoms at the University of Arizona
in 1959, the FBI considered more active countermeasures.

"Recognizing the type of speech an individual such as Moss
would probably make, I think it might be an excellent idea as a follow-up to
explore the possibility of having a Bureau speaker appear at the University of
Arizona at an opportune time," a Jan. 10, 1959 FBI memo proposed. "I think the
Phoenix office should secure additional data in a discreet fashion concerning
Moss's speech and explore the possibilities of having a Bureau speaker appear
before approximately the same group."

The "discreet fashion" proposed in the memo, sent to
Hoover's close personal assistant Clyde Tolson, was not fleshed out in the file;
Moss' speech was public and reported in the press. The FBI included a United
Press International report of Moss' speech, in which he complained that "the
federal government is substituting Madison Avenue fiction for the necessary
facts."

The FBI file does not, however, make clear whether the
agency succeeded in offering a rebuttal.

As the '60s blossomed, Moss had other run-ins with the FBI.

A September 1967 note upon the opening of a new FBI office
in Sacramento reiterated that "relations with Congressman Moss have been
generally not favorable." In a sign of the bureau's long bureaucratic memory,
the note cited critical comments made by Moss 12 years earlier.

That same year, Moss went to bat for one of his constituents
who had been denied an officer's commission in the Navy. Moss learned from the
Bureau of Navy Personnel that the man had, according to the FBI, engaged in
"questionable" behavior. Moss demanded to see the FBI information, prompting
what one July 1967 memo termed a "very heated" confrontation between the
congressman and Undersecretary of the Navy Robert Baldwin.

"(Baldwin) is extremely angry ... and personally very sorry
that the FBI's name became involved," the FBI memo stated.

An accompanying memo explained that "an FBI informant
operating in a valuable and sensitive covert role" had helped authorities
discover 81 grams of marijuana in the officer candidate's room and car. But Moss
had his doubts; the man's conviction at his court-martial was eventually
overturned because the car search had been illegal.

"Mr. Moss apparently is taking the position of fighting for
his constituent in order to obtain an Honorable Discharge," states the memo
written by a Navy captain and included in the FBI file. "He ... in fact stated
that he believed that we had planted the marijuana in (the candidate's) car to
get rid of him for other reasons."

Moss, defending the officer candidate as coming from a "fine
family," threatened to use his powers as a congressional subcommittee chairman
to force the FBI to release papers on the case. One of those documents alleged
the officer candidate "had previously lived with a homosexual."

The FBI, in one memo, noted that "we are very disturbed" by
the fact that Moss learned about the informant, and added, "We expect the party
responsible will be appropriately disciplined."

The file does not disclose what fate eventually befell
either Moss' constituent or the Navy captain who told Moss about the FBI
informant.

After the Freedom of Information Act took effect, the FBI
continued piling up documents. In July 1970, for instance, a top-ranking FBI
official wrote that Moss was "caustically" inquiring about whether the bureau
was blocking reporters' access to a hijacking incident at Washington Dulles
International Airport in Virginia. And by 1975, Moss was attempting to use FOIA
to obtain his own FBI and CIA files.

"The congressman was informed that the FBI has never
conducted an investigation concerning him, and our files contain only a small
number of references," a July 1975 memo stated. "It was mentioned to the
congressman that we also have in our possession some classified documents ...
(which) would be exempt from disclosure because of their classification."

Some of the documents in question concerned what an August
1975 memo called a "sensitive double agent operation targeted against a foreign
diplomatic official." An April 1975 memo from the CIA, included in the FBI file,
explained without elaborating that Moss' name "is mentioned collaterally" in the
reports.

This CIA memo identified three people in the memo, who
appear to be what were then Soviets. Their indirect connection to Moss is not
told; it's a mystery that even John Moss' Freedom of Information Act cannot
answer.